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Up to date there are 62 Prototypes built from the Global Village Construction Set. The production capabilities at Factor E Farm in the US are growing, the OSE network is expanding and the trend is clear – exponential growth.

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Germany

Our progress was slowed down because we were very few people working on the OSEG development and in some cases we didn’t work on our priorities. We share our failures so that others can learn from them. To fix that we are creating a Germany wide call for participation and started the OSEG Board as an initial structure of the Extreme Manufacturing platform as part of our stategic development.

Spain – Open E Land

Open E land is a six hectare site in rural, western Spain which the owner has made available for open source projects. It has suffered from the typical degradation of industrial agriculture – near complete loss of top soil and biodiversity with severe erosion and water management problems – and at the start of the year was just empty pasture with no infrastructure.

Our original idea was hold a two week summer camp during which we would construct the physical infrastructure, including a multipurpose strawbale building, to allow the site to be used as full time open source ecology project space. A few weeks into preparations it became apparent it would require a substantial battle to get planning permission to construct anything and take a minimum of six months to get approval – a depressing reminder of the obstructive inertia of governments attempting to preserve existing economic and agricultural models.

Because of this we decided the camp should focus less on construction and more on open source, skill sharing and permaculture. After ascertaining there was enough interest in the camp going ahead we circulated the following camp details:

With minimal effort in publicity and despite the site being fairly difficult to reach we were quickly overwhelmed with the response. At the point we were forced to close camp registration we had 50 people from across Spain and Europe registered – more than the site could comfortably support. A further 25 contacted us to get onto on a waiting list in case of cancellations.

With two weeks to to go we issued a crowd sourced fund raising campaign to help buy items for camp infrastructure. At this point there was just two people on site doing all the site preparation and online work, so the ability to develop and promote the campaign was very limited. Even so, we raised around half of the the €2000 we asked for.

The prepare for the event we constructed a 6m geodesic dome, a humanure toilet, shade structures, a shower and a kitchen and hoped it all would be enough. Over the course of the two weeks around 40 people turned up. Despite some oppressive daytime temperatures we ran workshops on subject such as Arduino programming, 3D printing, water management, CEB fabrication, permaculture, hammock making and cooking with natural ingredients. We had forums discussing open source, talks about natural construction methods, ran a kitchen for up to 30 people using organic ingredients sourced from local farms, constructed water management basins and check dams, built a 5m diameter reciprocal roof roundhouse, a 2m 3G/wifi reflector dish plus countless items of furniture from recycled wooden palettes.

We wanted to the camp to be as close to free as possible. People were welcome to cater for themselves or they could pay €5 a day for communal food from the kitchen. We originally aimed to run the kitchen at cost, but as it turned out we ended up making €450 from the takings. An honesty bar also contributed around €150. With donations the camp ended up paying for itself and left a legacy of infrastructure on the site.

In attempt to gain experience with CEB construction I had constructed a manual CEB press using the Open Source Resilient Living design. This was primarily made from recycled scrap metal using and very basic hand tools, with material costs less than €100. While I would not recommend this approach to the first time constructors, it is a worthwhile demonstration of what can be achieved with very little money and skill and I certainly learned a lot. After various alignment and precision problems were fixed it became apparent there were issues with the soil on site for CEB – although appearing to have a high clay and/or slit content it would require a lot of water to reach optimum water content and then would exhibit low compressibility and poor strength of the resultant brick. After attempting various experiments with adding course sand and lime more we less abandoned CEB construction for the time being.

We learned a huge amount from putting on the event and there is much still to document and share. Hopefully the foundations for future developments have been laid and discussion of events in the new year are in progress. For the moment the immediate legacy is the creation of a substantial network people and projects and the demonstration of considerable interest in this kind of event and the possibility of self funding models.

Cohabitat Gathering Festival is a two-days event, full of lectures and meetings of those, who wish to responsibly design and build a wise, fair world. Invited speakers will tell inspiring and incredible stories about their passion, working on certain technologies, tools and methods. All of that make it obvious that as a civilisation we are ready to give up outdated conceptions of development-for-development, we shall go further. We are able to create a healthy, comfy living space for all and retrieve the time for exploring the mystery of human being. Sounds exciting? That’s only the beginning.

We will take a closer look on natural architecture, healthy food in towns, devices collecting solar energy, communities management software, open source collaboration and many, many more essential issues.

UK

CEB press development in the UK is changing.

After talking with OSE Italy who managed to successfully develop a CEB press, we’ve decided to change our approach. Initially we wanted to focus on CEB press machine development by itself and then afterwards get a community of people interested in OSE. However, without a group of like-minded individuals, we’re missing out on the skills and resources that others can bring.

So we’re changing approach. We’re still developing the CEB press however, we also want you to get involved.

Our plan is to regularly meet as a group of people in London. Our goal is to develop the tools for the GVCS starting with the CEB press.

So if you live in the UK and are interested in OSE development, please get in touch! We plan on meeting in London within the next week or so and we want to see you there. Send an email to: contact (at) openator (dot) com and we’ll keep you up to date with the latest developments as well as when and where we’ll be meeting.

Ynternet

Ynternet.org team is supporting OSE since June 2012 by providing currently :
1) Management tools
2) Governance suggestions on case by case
3) documentations and knowledge on licensing and business model for OSE

Our methods :
A) Social bookmarking for State of the art.
For each demand, we try to identify the current state of the art in the domain concerned.
We use mostly the web to find useful articles tips and experts, and we gather these information into a social bookmarking working group anyone can apply to join : http://groups.diigo.com/group/os_ewatch

Who we are ?
A group of about 30 Independant trainers and researchers on digital culture, aiming at promoting common good and netizenship in information society.

Ecopol is spin off of Ynternet.org and Smala, developing ecological community-based co-living and coworking spaces. Smala have managed about 30 houses and now work on building We just found a land in Switzerland for 20 persons living and co-working, and besides we have a quite important project for 2000 persons. We plan to open a OSE-factory in Switzerland and another one in Brasil for 2015-2016.

Main delegates currently:
Théo Bondolfi (Switzerland) & Raphael Rousseau (France)
Finally, we are organizing the 11th eCulture forum in Geneva, April 17th, topic “wikinomics”, followed by a kick-off of the project of launching an OSE factory in French part of Switzerland for 2015, and we can host some OSE-Europe delegates around this event if this can help.

Marcin will be there, and we will organize a specific workshop for OSE technical challenges (details to come ASAP)

Solarflower

The Solarflower is an open source solar energy collector which tracks the sun automatically through a simple non-electrical mechanism.

It can be made almost anywhere from common recycled and salvaged materials using basic tools and skills, is portable, has no running costs or emissions, and can produce up to kilowatts of power per device.

Depending on available resources it should take one to three unskilled people less than a week to build, and cost well under €$£ 100.

Potential examples of use could include:

Electrical production with simple steam turbine/piston, with waste heat going to oven or hot water system.

Dome oven with integrated water system for temperature regulation and hot/pasteurized water.

After some delay we managed to publish the newest update of Open Source Ecology Europe community. After four months (previous update was at February) The network of OSE Europe keeps expanding with a new community in Serbia. Here is a short overview of the activities held by OSEE communities and keep running now and the past months.

GERMANY

The team and outside interest is growing. Our first team meeting was in Berlin on 25.-26. May. Three people are working on the Vertical Axis Wind Turbine, doing research, 3D modeling, simulations and building the first prototype with a LENZ2 profile. In Freiburg we are forming an open hardware group working on the GVCS CNC Circuit Mill and possibly a Juice Press.

We need help on the development of the Wilssen controller for monitoring the Wind Turbine.

(info by Nikolay Georgiev)

GREECE

We made connections with the Pirate Party of Greece. We wrote for them an article about Open Source and we presented OSE as well. The article published at Greek Pirate Party’s main page.

We expanded our network by made connections and collaborations with many groups and Eco-communities. Spithari â€“ Marathon Project Eco-community suggested us to built an CEB with full funding, but we lack of engineers in their region. Connections have been made in order to find people with technical knowledge in their region.

We organized and participated at The 5th FOSSCOMM Conference in Greece. FOSSCOMM has about 500 people every year and is an event that started around Linux distributions but has expanded to Open Source Hardware. This year we had full presentation of Open Source Ecology as well a presentation of OSE Greece’s work. We also had the Pirate Party of Greece for two presentations on open licenses and history of Copyright.

We have translated some material and we will soon print and distribute with the support of a non-profit organization called â€œEELLAKâ€.

We are trying to make contact with engineers here and abroad to motivate them contribute directly in the OSE wiki. We are archiving in our website â€“ blog every good link we find about things might be useful.

We made contact with Tim Sefton from â€œVolo Designsâ€. He expressed his thoughts for collaboration with OSE for the Stirling Engine project.

OSE Greece’s Core team (Nikolas Tokatis & Nikos Vasileiadis) is now editing and posting the Update Status Reports for OSEE main page.

Future plans are to test some technologies like Gardenbot & Garduino in the summer. We are monitoring the progress of project â€œHorto Domiâ€ too whose people have visited Open E Land. With the means we have we will focus on earthly matters.

(info by Nikolas Tokatis & Nikos Vasileiadis)

ITALY

We founded officially a web-master for Opensourceecology.it, we are now working on the Italian web site and on implementing the Extreme manufacturing platform ( Wikispeed organization model with scrum and agile methodology) on web server for OSE Italy.
We are also looking for a space where we can open our HubLab (named Bottega21) and we finished the conversion of the CEB Press master CAD.

We are also working on the business plan/model to create a new kind of coop enterprise that we call Bottega 21:

“In short, Bottega21 (B21 from now on) is a Common, cooperative, pear production center for manufacturing and creativity and design.

Is essentially a Framework for skills and ability with the right tool that can help people to express them self in the way they like but not only.
We think to it as an community owed coop Enterprise. The main business will not get focused only on the digital or personal manufacturing but also on the making of Open Source Ecology GVCS KIT in Italy.
We like to create a new concept of participative formation. Schools where people can be trained and formed on what they wont in a completely different way ( Extreme Manufacturing but not only ) in the Art of Making and Creativity ( yes that can surprise you guys but you can teach creative thinking ) So we live a duality between manufacturing and formation, a 2.0, all Italian style, fablab.

We are now finishing the conversion of the first prototype of the CEB Press, a machine of the GVCS KIT ( this week end it will be done ) and start to make the first of it with the EC Standard certificate in a couple of weeks ( we intend to spend about 4000 Euros).Â
We are also searching for some Business Angel or venture capitalist but also organizing an Indigogo crowed-funding for the start up of the B21 first Hub in Italy ( we are localized in Padua, Veneto, Northern Italy)Â .”

(info by Jacopo Guarda)

Poland

We started to organize Webinars for community (112 registered users for first one)
The NanoHabitat and Macrohabitat are ready.
We are preparing for Do-It-Yourself workshops in August

(info by Pawel Sroczynski)

SERBIA

Some people were visited one Terrain of 100 ha. We created the Facebook page of OSE Serbia and we plan to create an OSE standarts Eco village in Serbia. We translated a Wiki page from OSE and we search more materials. We also started building a web site. We are searching for new interested people to expand our network.
We found one more place to visit in order to decide where to create our Eco-village. We continue to translate documents.

(info by Milos Glisic)

SLOVENIA

Newly joined member Samo Blatnik on participation in OSE Europe blog updates has been established. We also made a collaboration with Tea house Adam & Eva in Maribor – we will get big room available for video screenings and place for new members to meet. Finally we started the translation to Slovenian of this guidelines.

(info by Samo Blatnik)

SPAIN

Open E Land

The last months we transported at the site the manual compressed earth brick press. The planning applications for buildings at Open E Land are ongoing and we hope to submit soon.
A Summer camp is being organized at Open E land and we already released the English and Spanish posters. A first batch of solar PV and inverter installed. We started to get visit requests from volunteers.

In May we were on the site for most of the month. At this time we build a greenhouse, installed water storage, Started testing soil with CEB press and manufacturing CEB samples, clearing land for planting, started covering our dome with permanent covering and visited to earthship.es to learn about their experiences.

(info by Angel – Open E land)

UK

Adam developed the website http://www.Openator.com offering the CEB press machine and potential services around the press to see what the response by customers is like.

From this we’ve had a number of inquiries, and there seems to be enough people who are interested in using the CEB press machine in housing construction. This has made us much more confident that people would like to use the machine so I’ve moved ahead with construction. We aim to complete this construction during the summer.

We had a development issue with the machine is converting all of the designs from imperial measurements to metric measurements. We got in contact with William Neal, a guy from Canada who is currently in China. He’s been leading this conversion process but we’ve been helping him out with it. These designs will obviously be shared but we want to make sure they’re correct first.

We are finishing two Lifetracks and we are going to ship the one, we also modifying to CEB press and building one more. We bought tools and the workshop is going to be ready. The Hablab will be operational in in a few weeks.

By supporting this campaign you are helping spread and open source a cost-effective, high-power solar concentrator that can be built anywhere. This can help decrease energy poverty for millions of people and reinforce autonomy.

The WikiSpeed campaign is about:Creating a 100mpg open source comfy commuter car. It’s about taking ultra-efficient modular prototypes to the mainstream. Helping the environment, reducing everyone’s cost at the gas pump, and revolutionising automotive manufacturing.
Your money will specifically fund;

Ten additional crash tests,

Fuel-efficiency testing,

Materials for prototyping and testing,

Expert reviews and fabrication, and

The additional tools required to make the future of automotive transportation happen right now.

WIKISPEED is a registered automotive manufacturer and able to deliver complete vehicles in the United States and kits globally.

By supporting this campaign you are REVOLUTIONISING AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING as it is knows in the world today!

And by supporting both these campaigns, you will be improving the life conditions for all of us on this planet:)